


The Art (Of War)

by calico_fiction



Series: little cuts [7]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Censorship, Character Study, Cis-Normativity, Colonialism, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Arranged Marriage, Implied/Referenced Slavery, Mother-Son Relationship, Non-Graphic Violence, Non-Linear Dream Sequence, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Pre-Canon, Prophetic Dreams, References to Norse Religion & Lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:35:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22185727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calico_fiction/pseuds/calico_fiction
Summary: Thor has learned that the past and the present and the future are three strands in a string, woven together.
Relationships: Frigga | Freyja & Thor (Marvel)
Series: little cuts [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1121556
Comments: 5
Kudos: 41





	The Art (Of War)

**Author's Note:**

> This was difficult to tag. If you have tag suggestions let me know.
> 
> I used accusations similar to blood libel to demonstrate that the justifications for violence against a specific being were falsified for a political agenda. It's vague and brief but might be triggering.
> 
> Hermodr is the Norse messenger of the Gods. Skadi is the Norse Goddess of the Hunt. In Norse mythology, Frigga is Vanir.

Thor is making merry after a grand adventure. He is too drunken already to tell the tale anymore. Around him, Thor's friends are loud and raucous and warm. Volstagg has his shirt torn from his shoulders and falling about his waist, still tucked into his pants, arm wrestling a maiden who seems taken with him with one hand and feeding himself roast boar with the other. Fandral's back, still tacky through his shirt with blood (someone else's) and sweat (his own), is pressed against Thor's side, his laughter bright in Thor's ear, each of his arms wrapped round the shoulders of a breathtaking woman. Sif is drinking men under the table, them lining up orderly before her for the privilege. Loki has taken up the mantle of recounting their victory, standing on top of the table with softly glowing fingers as illusions dance around him. His rhymes are steadily declining in quality as he continues to drink as well, though even still his voice never breaks and he never stutters.

There is something not quite right, but Thor cannot place it.

The hot sun beats down through a clear blue sky. The earth underneath Thor's boots is hard-packed and flat. He's braced on the balls of his feet with a sword in each hand, a layer of sweat building underneath his leather and plate armor. Steve is on his left, Loki on his right, and ahead of them, charging, is a seemingly unending herd of beasts. The beasts are like hairless, blind dogs with thick mottled grey skin.

The blood of the dog-beasts smells foul in the heat of the day, twice as much so underscored with the bright ozone scent of Thor's lightning. They are loud as they attack, and loud as they die, and loud as they continue and continue and continue to charge. Thor is slick with gore. Some has gotten into his mouth, tasting of rot. He has lost track of Loki on the battlefield. He wonders if he will ever see his brother again.

The snowy air at the topmost open arched stone window of the All-Mother's favorite palace tower stings pleasantly in Thor's lungs as he looks out across the glittering landscape below. He feels strange, as if he hasn't yet earned the right to stand here, despite that he was born in this palace. Some of the roofs below are gilded in gold. Thor thinks they are beautiful and familiar and majestic, and also hideous and sickening and garish. He feels powerful, righteous. He feels betrayed, guilty. Huginn sits at his left hand. Muninn is absent. Thor can't remember ever being able to tell the difference between them without being told before. His mother stands at his right shoulder, leaning comfortably in the window on her elbow, smiling gently, patiently. She was always so patient with him.

"I'm afraid it won't ever get less confusing," she tells him. Her mouth is twisted in a wry humor that she has only ever allowed Thor to see once or twice before, but her eyes are clear and lit with a soft happiness. "It's an art."

"What is?" Thor asks. He feels in his heart that he knows what she's talking about, but his mind hasn't caught up yet.

Loki stands on a sleek granite bar top in low yellow lighting. He is drunk, and his hair is frizzed from dried sweat. There are four vicious, painful looking gashes across his face but his eyes are bright and his grin is stretched wide, showing all his teeth. He is telling a grand story, gesturing, belatedly adding in his trademark illusory visual aids. His voice is as smooth and perfect as ever, and he folds the interjections of others into his tale with the same ease as always. Thor is watching him from a couch a small distance away, drinking as well, but for once not one of Loki's hecklers. Unfamiliar music is playing, loudly enough that Thor cannot hear Loki's words. He follows Loki's illustrations instead, with half an eye. More important is Loki himself. He seems hale enough, despite his wounds. Hopefully he's not hiding anything, this time.

The All-Father and the All-Mother sit together in an oversized rocking chair, Odin's arm over Frigga's shoulders and the two of them draped in furs. They are young, too young, younger than Thor has ever known them to be. They rock back and forth minutely, and at their feet with her head in Frigga's lap is Hela. She too is younger than Thor knows her, but the difference in her is not as stark; she is already fully a woman. Thor holds his breath tightly, though by now he has realized that he is not really here.

"Will it be a brother or a sister?" Hela asks. Her voice is bored but her attention on Frigga is sharp. Such an attitude is painfully familiar to Thor.

"A brother," Odin answers just as Frigga opens her mouth, and Thor knows in the way one knows things in one's dreams that his mother was going to say something else.

"I'll still be Queen," Hela says. It's not a question. Odin frowns mightily and Thor's heart races in reflex. His head spins with how he fears them both, and pities them both. As he is struggling silently, Frigga looks up from the dark top of Hela's head and perfectly meets Thor's eyes.

"Wake up, my sweet boy," she murmurs. Her breath fogs in the air as a golden mist, and the other two don't react to her movement or her words. "This serves you nothing."

The sky is blue, the horizon is blue, the earth is blue, the sun is blue. The air is painfully cold, stabbing like knives into Thor's lungs. There is a baby crying somewhere in the near distance. Muninn sits silent and still atop the snow in front of Thor and watches him expectantly.

Fandral has joined Loki on the table now, the two of them laughing uproariously as they dance around in a tight circle, their elbows linked. Sif is surrounded by a dozen men all but piled on top of each other, drooling and groaning. She catches Thor's eye and winks broadly. Volstagg is in his underthings now and hosting an impromptu lecture on proper smithing to an enthralled semi-circle of maidens. Many of the maidens are flushed of face, but whether from the mead or from Volstagg's attention it cannot be said.

There must be some reason Thor is here.

Across the hall Odin and Frigga sit in their high seats of honor, drinking alone and presiding over the revelry. For the first time Thor wonders if they are lonely up there, is grateful that he and Loki were always permitted to mingle among their peers (that they were permitted to _have_ peers). Tyr approaches Odin from the side and the two lean their heads together to speak privately in the crowded room. Frigga ignores them, and instead meets Thor's eyes across the hall.

"Wake up," she says, and her voice reaches Thor's ears as clearly as if she was right beside him. "It is past, Thor."

But Thor knows now that the past is not something that is ever over. The past and the present and the future are three strands in a string, woven together.

Thor is a child, sick with fever. His mother pets his hair back from his hot forehead. She hums quietly, a soothing lullaby that he has heard since the very beginning of his life.

"I'm so proud of you," she whispers. Thor remembers this. She did say that, then, and it had seemed such a non sequitur. "You will be the greatest king Asgard has yet known." Thor had spoken then to insist that Loki might be king instead and Frigga had smiled enigmatically. Now he knows Frigga is not voicing hopes and expectations, but knowledge. He breathes shakily under the reassurance, under the pressure.

"Can I learn to control this?" he asks her. His voice comes out of child him as it is now. Frigga smiles enigmatically, and pets his hair.

"Hermodr has found another cache," Tyr reports to Odin in one of Odin's private strategy rooms. It is one Thor has never been in before, but it is set up like all the others so it is familiar enough. Odin frowns mightily, leaning heavily on the arm of his ornate chair at the head of the small table.

"How many of them are there," he grumbles. Tyr makes no response. Odin sighs, a great gust from his nostrils. He rubs his face, weary. "Where is it?" Tyr takes a breath to answer, but Odin cuts him off with a negligent wave of his hand. "Nevermind. Just have Skadi drive some monster there. An adventuring party will take care of it."

"'An adventuring party'," Tyr quotes, amused. "You mean your sons?" Odin waves his hand again, not so humored as Tyr.

"Whoever it happens," he says.

Huginn and Muninn are both on the window now, both watching Thor with knowing black eyes. Frigga touches his elbow gently.

"Wake up," she insists. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind his ear. "Wake up."

Hogun is playing a lyre in accompaniment to Loki's and Fandral's tale-and-dance now. After a particularly unsteady spin, Loki folds himself down onto the table just shy of gracelessly. Fandral continues to dance around him and Hogun cracks a rare full-faced grin at the antics. Loki clasps his hands together and slowly draws them apart, revealing in between them the shining form of a fiery dog-like beast. He tells of the treasure it surely guarded, pacing back and forth at a fork in its cavernous dwelling, but of how felling the thing was more important. More noble to kill it dead without material reward. Thor is glad he is not really here. Not really drunk. Though he was then. He was, and to him then this story was true. It was true and good, and did not make him feel this nausea.

Thor is a teen, awake in his and Loki's childhood bed. Loki is having a nightmare and Thor, finally having taken to his grueling implicit lessons in emotional distance, lays there in awkward silence not knowing what to do. Their mother steps smoothly out from the shadows in a corner of the room not near the door. Thor is used to this; it's more comforting than not.

"Wake up," Frigga says. Thor had been confused at the time that she had said it to him rather than to Loki who seemed more to need the waking, but now he knows she was not really there and she spoke not to him then but him now.

Thor hesitates once among the hoard of dog-beasts and nearly loses his leg for it. Magic saves him, not Loki's or Wanda's, but familiar, sparking and yellow-orange. The mage offers him a hand up and Thor takes it, though he doesn't like particularly to do it.

"Wake up, Your Majesty" says the mage. His voice and face are flat, but his eyes are both sharply curious and helplessly sympathetic.

Thor doesn't know what the fiery canine monster is and he does not care. He is excited to kill it. Rumors of the terror this beast has caused the village east of this cave had reached Asgard days ago. It sets fires, the whispers said, and to look at it they are so obviously true. It is a thief too, the rumors said, and it eats children.

They drown the monster and flood its cavern with such ferocity that the whole of its mountain collapses upon its smoldering, steaming corpse. Everything inside is surely destroyed, but the village will be too grateful to be free of the tyranny of the beast to mourn their goods overmuch.

Thor is victorious. Thor is self-loathing.

Hela lounges at the right hand of Odin in one of the strategy rooms, her legs thrown up upon the table. She is more noticeably youthful this time; a teen, though otherwise no different. Odin watches her fondly as she feasts on dark cherries. The juice on her teeth and running down her thin, sharp-nailed fingers looks like blood. She drops the stems on the floor, and spits the seeds at passing round-shouldered servants. In the corner a scribe diligently records the meeting.

"We needn't take slaves," Tyr is saying. "The Vanir are artists anyway, their people would hardly offer much in the way of labor-"

"Good thing you're not in charge of anything," Hela interrupts, crass. "They're not artists anymore. The only art that matters is ours." She laughs. " _If_ that." She goes back to her cherries, leaving Tyr to fume. Odin says nothing. Hela's proclamation stands. After several cherries, Hela makes a thoughtful noise. "Maybe you could take a new wife," she adds to Odin. He smiles, two-eyed and indulgent.

Thor wakes in his bed on a stolen ship filled with refugees, one-eyed and devastated.


End file.
